by Mark Palmer
In-shop advertisements for Clarks ‘First Shoes’ spoke directly to responsible mothers:
Isn’t it exciting that your child is, at last, walking? And isn’t it so important that his or her First Shoe allows the soft, delicate bones to grow in a strong, healthy way? Clarks share your concern. That’s why all Clarks First Shoes come in a range of styles, in up to four width fittings and in whole and half sizes. Why we build at least three months growing room into all our shoes. And why the trained fitter in this shop will measure both tiny feet for width and length using a Clarks footgauge for guidance; you really can’t put your child’s feet in more caring, capable hands.
Where Clarks gained an advantage over its competitors was insisting that retailers carried shoes in all width fittings, and backing this up with a warehouse system that would speedily replenish stock rather than burdening retailers with an excessive number of unsold shoes that they had to store for several weeks.
Then, in the early 1960s, Clarks rolled out its successful ‘no fit, no sale’ campaign, which cemented the notion that the company prized comfort before profit. Bancroft would say many years later that the footgauge was the idea on which ‘the vast expansion in our children’s business was founded’.
Shop interior in Cheltenham in the mid-1950s, showing the children’s fitting area.
The teenage market had not been forgotten either. Indeed, in 1950, Clarks was the first British shoe manufacturer to produce a special range for young people, after Bill Graves made several investigative trips to America, where the idea of teenagers seeking greater independence from their parents was far more developed than in Britain. This forward thinking sat comfortably beside Clarks’ so-called ‘Style Centre’ in Street, where all kinds of fashion items from America and continental Europe were studied in detail – buckles, belts, fabrics, pullovers – to see how they might influence the design of shoes.
There was forward thinking, too, in promoting the Clarks brand. Advertising and celebrity endorsements had continued apace at C. & J. Clark as soon as wartime hostilities were over. Advertisements were placed on trains on the London Underground and in daily and Sunday newspapers, and famous names were invited to tour the factory – with their visits publicised far and wide. One such exercise in ‘under the line advertising’ took place in 1946 when Margaret Lockwood, probably the country’s most popular actress at the time, came to Street with her daughter – and the Bristol Evening World was invited along. It was, according to the gushing copy, ‘one of those happy occasions when the spirit of good humour is abroad and everything proceeds with cheerful spontaneity’. Lockwood – who had starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1938 and more recently in the splendidly racy and controversial Gainsborough Studios melodrama The Wicked Lady in 1945 – was photographed arriving to a gathering throng, signing the visitors’ book, chatting to women in the Closing Room, watching as her daughter’s feet were measured and generally looking suitably impressed. ‘Miss Lockwood enjoys wearing Clarks shoes in private life and says that she frequently receives complimentary comments on her footwear’, the article concluded.
The British film star Margaret Lockwood and her daughter Toots arriving at Clarks in Street on 23 August 1946.
Margaret Lockwood with women factory workers during her 1946 visit to the Clarks factory.
Royal connections were fostered. The then Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were seen to be wearing Clarks shoes on their South African tour of 1947 and, by chance, the Queen, accompanied by Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and the Duke of Edinburgh, visited the Clarks stand at the 1949 British Industries Fair at Olympia. A year earlier, Clarks had staged the first invitation-only private mannequin show ever to be held in Denmark, displaying 30 models of shoe. It took place at the Hotel Angleterre and was attended by some 130 buyers from Scandinavia and Holland.
Hugh Clark – in charge of home sales from the late 1920s until 1952 – took a keen interest in advertising and publicity. In April 1946, he explained:
Princess Margaret (at left) and Princess Elizabeth both wearing Clarks shoes during an official tour of South Africa in March 1947. Princess Elizabeth is wearing Montana sandals.
We have, as manufacturers, to educate the public on such things as the fitting of children’s shoes, we have to give information about trends in fashion, we have to present a case to the public and try to make people understand what kind of a firm is making their shoes. All these things, and many more, are part of the useful job that advertising must do.
Soliciting feedback from the public was encouraged, if only to pass on any favourable comments to the workforce as morale boosters. On one occasion, in response to the platform-soled, open-backed Roxanne shoe, a former Wren from Maidstone was moved to write a poem and send it to Street. It began:
I was reading the paper, and saw Roxanne.
And straight away out in the street, I ran
Thinking how lovely, how grand, how divine,
If I am lucky a pair will be mine.
Wilfrid Hinde’s role as export director had been taken over in 1946 by Nathan Clark, son of Roger Clark, and his department became known as the Overseas Division. Nathan, who had spent six years in Burma and India, appointed a fellow Royal Army Service Corps officer, Jack Rose-Smith, as sales manager, based in Street. Known as something of a free spirit within the Clark clan, Nathan occupied himself mainly with foreign licensing agreements to make shoes, while Rose-Smith took responsibility for direct export sales.
It was while Nathan was an officer in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1941 that he first chanced upon the idea of the Desert Boot. He had been posted to Burma and ordered to help establish a supply route from Rangoon to the Chinese forces at Chongqing. The road was never built after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, triggering a new phase in the Second World War, but Nathan had made a note of what soldiers were wearing on their feet and, minded that Bancroft had asked him to be on the lookout for new designs originating from that part of the world, he duly reported back. As it happened, he had not one but two novel ideas: the Desert Boot and the Chupplee. The latter – which was withdrawn from sale in the 1970s – was an open-toe sandal based on what men wore in Northwest India, with plenty of soft leather covering the contours of the foot. It was certainly not a flip-flop.
Nathan never drew a salary from Clarks and he left the company in 1951 to pursue his own interests. But in 1979 he explained that his inspiration for the Desert Boot came from
… crepe-soled rough suede boots which officers in the Eighth Army were in the habit of getting made in the Bazaar in Cairo. Some of these officers came to Burma, and this is where I saw them. It is said that the original idea was from officers of the South African Division in the desert and that the origin of theirs goes back to the Dutch Voertrekkers footwear made of rough, tanned leather called Veldt Schoen. This name is familiar to us in shoe manufacturing as the old name for the sandal veldt, or stitch-down process.
A Christmas card with a photograph of himself sent home by Nathan Clark while based in India during the Second World War.
Nathan sent sketches and rough patterns to Bancroft, but nothing happened until he returned to Street. Once back, he approached an experienced pattern cutter called Bill Tuxill, but, as Nathan put it:
… every time I went to see how my two shoes were getting on, I would see the sketches on his back shelf, and he would say with some embarrassment: ‘Yes, Mr Nathan, I will get on with them next thing.’
Eventually Nathan began cutting them himself, but when he produced trial samples they were not greeted with much enthusiasm.
A Londoner, Ken Crutchlow, gave the Desert Boot a spectacular publicity boost when he wore a pair to run across California’s Death Valley in 1970. Photographs accompanying the story were widely published.
Then, in 1949, while attending the Chicago Shoe Fair, he showed the samples to Oskar Schoefler, fashion editor of Esquire magazine, who was so impressed that he ran a whole feature
on the shoe, complete with colour photographs. A star was born. It immediately sold well in America and Canada and became the first adult Clarks shoe to be made in Australia. In a 1957 advertisement, Clarks called Desert Boots the ‘world’s most travelled shoes’.
In Europe, Lancelot (Lance) Clark, son of Tony Clark, helped to popularise the Desert Boot and it reached record sales in 1971. A publicity coup had come a year earlier when Ken Crutchlow, an eccentric Englishman, ran 130 miles across Death Valley in California wearing a bowler hat on his head and Desert Boots on his feet. This was not a master stroke of product placement conjured up by Clarks executives, but the result of a $1,000 bet Crutchlow had with a friend. Pictures of Crutchlow in his Desert Boots appeared in more than 150 newspapers and magazines and were estimated to have been seen by 30 million people.
The Desert Boot has developed a momentum all of its own ever since – and led to some curious associations. Liam Gallagher, lead singer of the now disbanded rock band Oasis, and Clarks might not seem like a perfect fit, but the former rabble-rouser was so taken by the Desert Boot in the 1990s that he hardly wore anything else and then went one step further by collaborating with Clarks to design his own version of the boot as part of his Pretty Green clothing label. Not to be outdone, Bob Dylan and Robbie Williams were seen sporting Desert Boots around the same time and it wasn’t long before others jumped on the bandwagon. Sarah Jessica Parker was spotted in the David Z store in New York’s Soho buying two pairs, one brown, one black, because she couldn’t decide which colour she liked best. And the Jamaican rapper Vybz Kartel wove Desert Boots into one of his songs. Tony Blair, never one to miss a photo opportunity, opted two years into his premiership to wear a pair of Desert Boots in 1999 while promoting his Cool Britannia campaign.
The Desert Boot was nominated in 2009 by The Design Museum in London as one of the ’50 Shoes that Changed the World’ and by the beginning of 2012, more than 10 million pairs had been sold in over 100 countries. This is not a bad outcome for a shoe that its creator was told would never sell.
By 1945, exports had shrunk to virtually nothing, but two years later Clarks was doing business with Africa, Australasia, the Middle East, America, Canada, the West Indies, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Scandinavia and Holland. In Holland, a Jewish refugee called Bob Arons proved sceptics wrong. Wilfrid Hinde had written to Arons telling him that ‘owing to a number of changed circumstances we are doubtful … our footwear can be sold again in Holland in worthwhile quantities’. A year on, in 1946, and Arons had sold 10,000 pairs in the Netherlands, turning over £43,500.
Nathan, in charge of the Overseas Division, was keen to find production partners abroad, but Bancroft was more cautious. Deals, however, were signed with two firms in Australia, Alma Shoes Ltd and Enterprise Shoe Company. Alma was founded in 1925 by Thomas Harrison, who had emigrated from Stockton-on-Tees in 1910. He died in 1936 and, although his son took over, the company was in trouble. Clarks agreed to take 51 per cent of Alma’s equity as part of what Nathan described to Bancroft as a ‘manufacturing service agreement’. Enterprise was a neighbouring shoe factory which was also in dire straits. It specialised in men’s boots and shoes. These two acquisitions led to the formation of Clarks Australia Ltd in the summer of 1948, structured in a similar way to Clarks Ireland Ltd.
In a minuted conversation, Nathan told Bancroft that ‘the time for development in overseas is now, and … the opportunity which exists for such development allows for no delay’. He wanted to push on in India, where he believed that independence would lead to protective tariffs on imports. Nathan felt a trading door was about to close. In 1948, he persuaded Bancroft to head East and organised meetings with Cooper, Allen & Co. and with the British India Corporation, but such was the political uncertainty in India that no deal was struck. Leaving Nathan in India, Bancroft returned to the UK on board Pan Am’s Empress of the Skies from Calcutta. During the flight, Bancroft had watched a small child running up and down the aisle wearing a pair of Clarks shoes. After landing in London, the Lockheed Constellation aircraft took off again en route to Shannon, in Ireland, from where it was scheduled to continue its journey to America. But it crashed near Shannon airport, killing all but one passenger. The child wearing Clarks did not survive.
Bancroft’s reluctance to rush into overseas production was not a new issue for C. & J. Clark. John Angell Peck, who had been appointed Clarks representative in Australia and New Zealand back in 1899 and who died in 1941, had repeatedly urged the board to open a factory in that part of the world to avoid import tariffs. But it never happened during Peck’s lifetime.
Bancroft’s official notes on overseas policy show that the board was ‘only prepared to experiment with overseas development … provided it [does not] endanger our home prosperity’. But Nathan continued to press for it, arguing the case for ‘putting our eggs in several baskets all over the world’, to which Bancroft responded that such a strategy was ‘hard to carry out when you were short of eggs … it was little use finding the eggs if you could not find the hens to sit on them’.
At one point, a deal was in the offing with the Port Elizabeth Boot Company in South Africa, whereby it would make women’s and children’s shoes, but this collapsed, whereupon Nathan focused his attention on Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Clarks Australia Ltd began making shoes in Adelaide in 1949, while in New Zealand, where there had been an embargo on shoe imports for twelve years – with the exception of infants’ footwear – plans were afoot to make and market shoes through Clarks New Zealand Ltd.
Bancroft was fourteen years older than his brother Nathan. Their relationship was strained. Towards the end of 1949 – by which time Nathan was working at Halliday’s in Ireland – Bancroft jotted down his thoughts about the future of the Overseas Division, but there is no evidence that he made them public. In fact, eighteen months later, on 22 July 1951, he scribbled at the top of the first page: ‘No one saw this’. Perhaps his musings were cathartic. Certainly they were unsparing in their criticism of his globe-trotting brother:
NMC’s [Nathan Middleton Clark] effort is discursive. He flirts with new ideas such as selling last-making machinery and selling his latest patent on a royalty basis. He does this without carrying with him his home base and in his last promotion in the US makes statements [that are] untrue. In fact which were not checked by the responsible people in Street.
Writing in his own hand, Bancroft continued:
NMC suffers from lack of sustained effort. In Australia there has been no progress because of difficulties which have accumulated that side. NMC blames CJC [C. & J. Clark] for not developing new styles which he said in summer ’48 were needed … [but] NMC is no judge of what is right for the home market. He has no knowledge of it – no experience of it – he has the right and duty to bring back information and suggestions which may help to strengthen CJC in the home market but has no standing or position or right to criticise CJC’s home market operations.
Bancroft felt Nathan had wasted twelve months in Australia ‘shilly shallying’ and believed there was no point pursuing overseas production without a planned sales policy to go with it:
Without it the best manufacturing will fail from vacillation. I have told NMC this many times and sent him to Ireland last summer to work it out but he runs away from the problem.
Such was Bancroft’s exasperation that he expressed a ‘wide doubt’ as to whether Nathan had been suitable to run the Overseas Division at all.
His abilities are very great. He is a tremendous salesman and fruitful in ideas. I think it might be possible to run the OD [Overseas Division] if NMC were accepted as salesman and had under him a permanent deputy head of the OD through which all directions would go and who would be answerable for all actions of the others in the division. NMC has refused this and is working away from it.
Bancroft reported to the board at the end of 1949 that, under Nathan, the exports market had ‘on balanc
e lost money’ and he expected the situation would not change in 1950.
Working at Clarks meant security – in many cases, a job for life. Maurice Burt joined Clarks in 1948 at the age of nineteen. His father was a labourer and he was brought up with his two brothers in Long Sutton, Somerset. On leaving school at fourteen, he joined a local woodwork company and then spent two years in the Royal Navy. Speaking in the summer of 2011 at his house in Street within walking distance of the factory, he describes his situation:
Press cutting at Street for the Skyline range in 1949.
When I came out of the Navy, Clarks was recruiting and really it was just a matter of turning up and filling out a form. They were looking for people and you had to be fairly backward not to be offered something. Because of the war and everything I didn’t have much of an education. I realised from an early age that I had to use my hands more than my brains if I was going to get on.
Maurice started in the finishing room doing odd jobs, which was something of a rite of passage for new recruits, a period of unofficial apprenticeship during which the supervisors – known as the ‘white coats’ – would assess work and attitude and place the men and women accordingly. In 1948, Maurice was on the equivalent of £2.50 a week. There were three grades of employee – weekly, fortnightly and monthly – but it took some considerable time to become a proper staff member if you joined straight from school. In Maurice’s case, his letter informing him that he was a fully signed-up member of staff was dated 12 January 1962, fourteen years after he first cycled over to Street for his interview.